YouTube quietly adds GIF creation tool to select videos

Creating a GIF from a YouTube video no longer requires leaving the popular video sharing website. The Google-owned company has quietly rolled out a way to make GIFs from select videos in an instant because what the Internet needs is more GIFs, no?

The service isn’t available on all videos just yet, but for ones that are enabled (like those from the PBS Idea Channel), you’ll simply need to click / tap Share then GIF. Doing so will bring up a GIF creator that lets you select the start and stop time of the GIF based on the video as well as insert top and bottom text.

When your masterpiece is complete, click or tap Create GIF and you’re done. The tool defaults to a three-second clip although that can be condensed down to 0.3 seconds or stretched out to six seconds.

The process is really simple and the GIF is churned out in no time flat. Best yet, YouTube hosts it and provides a direct link, embed code and links to post to social media. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

YouTube has since responded to news reports, pointing out that the GIF creation tool is currently in beta. It’s unclear at this hour which other channels YouTube has selected to participate in the beta or the criteria used to select early partners but you can submit your channel for consideration.